I hacked together a quick fix for you guys for sz 64/65. Posted it to the thread. Let me know if she does the trick. Just need to replaced the BaseTiles and ReliefTiles folders with those updated ones and add in the Polygon txt for the new shapes.
I can copy over the changes to the expansion boxes map when I get back to my house in a couple days.
Thanks again for hunting these down! Tough one to spot right there for sure. Appreciate the extra sets of eyes hehe
All the best
Elk
Here is the update for sz 64/65. Probably gave me the slip cause it’s harder to see the map wrap in GIMP. I just hacked in a couple lines, hopefully passes muster.
Looks like so
Here is a zip folder with a BaseTiles and ReliefTiles folders updated (already run through the tile breaker.)
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1nqernvZtD8MYOstgAblw8DDZ4Hrk4JLb/view?usp=sharing
Here are the Base and Relief as single images
Base
https://drive.google.com/file/d/134oogwEtlLW1kkHR_zvvXJCpDtUxiDzH/view?usp=sharing
Relief
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1zRi0q7AqTQrHfCikDEnW1aAw5J5QRe0Y/view?usp=sharing
Here is the Polygon txt attached below
Let me know if that works for ya. I’m pinballing around at the moment, but I can update the other boxes map/polys on Friday. Or you can just copy/paste that section over from the UHD if you need it before then.
Thanks again for helping me catch all these damned connection goofs lol. Hopefully we nailed em all! Good work gang
Good catch! Probably easiest is to angle and drop the line off Peru to comes down. Should be a simple enough fix to the baseline, I just need to cutout the new line in the relief. I’ll try to get it sorted by the weekend
Here’s a quick edit that should be serviceable for now. Just needs a little touch up for the blur.
zip with the BaseTiles and ReliefTiles for the map folder
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ZkhnF2Dzwx-9K2vUFWLqI-rE1WwDLafA/view?usp=sharing
Here is the txt file for the polys for the shift
Should look like this when you fire it up. I can clean the border fade a bit later. This was just to strong arm the line into place. I tried to leave a little bit on the Afghanistan side just to suggest the shape. Just like pretending the frontier there is sorta disputed. Makes sense hopefully.
ps. I was looking at this image when I made it initially. Well not this image exactly, now for some reason I can only find that map on Etsy, or at one of those image clearing-house sites that seem to have scooped everything and put it behind a paywall in the past couple years. But anyway you can see off there to the righthand side the Wakhjir Pass that leads to China. Like since ancient times Silk road style, but it’s pretty tiny so I think OOB it just gets clipped or abstracted into the Mountains next door. Just a holdover from the larger map probably. We’ll nix it to avoid the confusion.
The sea zone Geometry is harder, just cause so much is already in place. If I had it to do again I’d probably rework the warp of the entire globe to make it a bit more G40 OOB-esque. I imagine the OOB may have been drawn by hand or using the warps and such, like in Photoshop to stretch and morph stuff. But because tripleA needs the baseline at 1px and 100% black it means retracing the entire thing to do a big warp change like that. Otherwise the lines will have interpolation applied and go fuzzy when using the transformation tools. Plus it would nix whatever is already going on with the coordinates in the polygons files or the place files. OOB is basically 2:1 aspect ratio, like where each theater board is a square. Here it’s more rectangular like with the whole thing targeting more 16:9-ish. That’s like before the compression for the Global south that you’d see on the OOB map, I just mean the overall dimensions. Also how North America is stitched in/re-sized. It means the horizontal lines will strike at different spots when trying to match the Sea Zone shapes exactly. Kinda tough, I wasn’t able to find an awesome solution, but I also didn’t really start with the G40 in mind, which made it unnecessarily complex there probably. Like if I’d just started from the G40 might have been easier to move a couple islands around or stretch Asia and North America to fit just so. Maybe for a 2.0 if I ever get around to it hehe
Good catch!
I’ll fix it up over the weekend
I think that part of the board gets a little tricky just cause it’s where the two sides of the map meet OOB. Looking at the cardboard version, I think basically that portion of Afghanistan east of Kunduz with the little strip was sorta folded into the neighboring impassible tile there. I think we can just carve into the tip a little bit to remove the errant connection.
Yeah I agree the geometry for the Sea Zones in the Central Pacific can be a bit awkward in translation. I think I spent many many hours just looking at the board on my carpet, and then on the laptop to compare and see if I was managing the connections alright, and still had a bunch of stuff giving me the slip.
For OOB you got that situation where the naval sculpts are pretty large, so the sea zones need to be extra beefy to hold them all. I drew the landmap first for that other board, then collapsed a bunch of the boundaries to get back to the G40 playscale. Sea Zones were the last thing added. If I was going the other way, I could bend the land territories to fit the more familiar sea zone shapes, but I started with the warp for the continents first. Here I basically tried to preserve the contours of the land, and then bent the sea zones to match, if that makes sense.
It’s sorta hit or miss in some spots just because of the overall shape of the continents. Like if prepping for the tournaments there’d be an advantage to using Bung’s, just cause those sz shapes fit the OOB and the land is more abstract. To me it felt somehow more believable to keep the land territory shapes and those contours a little truer to reality and just adjust the abstract sea zone shapes where I had to. I mean there’s still hella distortion all over the place, but just that idea that I could try to make the shapes a bit more familiar in South Asia or Coastal China, or a bit less compression going on for Africa and such. But then where the horizontal lines strike into the coastal TTs, had to make some adjustments along the way. Part of it was just trying to get some of those lines to hit the right coastal territories, when the stretches weren’t quite as extreme.
I didn’t even notice this sub-section till just now lol
13 team games!? That’s pretty rad
I don’t suppose anyone wants to tool around with the map? I upscaled the old baseline I had using same method as the other jumbo maps, but I’m kinda spent. There’s a fair bit of tedium in re-assigning the centers for the enlarged map. Once the centers are assigned it’s much faster to re-run the polygrabber in the map tools to enlarge everything.
https://forums.triplea-game.org/topic/3803/uhd-domination-nml-upscaled-baseline
Sorry only just saw this
So step one would be finding the right image editing program for what you’re trying to achieve. TripleA uses raster graphics images (basically png) and is not suitable for printing. Upscaling the largest relief I’ve made in tripleA and trying to print it at 600 dpi the filesize gets quite beefy. Basically an image that’s like 50mb for use in tripleA is going to climb way up by orders of magnitude into the many gigabytes. It will also tax the RAM pretty hard if you’re trying to edit an image that large (in actual dimensions) like trying to use multiple layers at once. I have a pretty high end gaming laptop and I topped out around 8000p before GIMP started giving me headaches and slowing to a crawl.
What you probably want is an image that you can manipulate as SVG rather than PNG. A vector so you can upscale the image to any dimensions that way (basically the same way font works.) I would try Inkscape or Adobe, and try to get a pull of the image as a vector graphic.
You can start the same as you would in tripleA by creating a baseline image of the basic world map, the continent contours or world warp you want and the territory or sea zone divisions, showing just the basic borderlines in 100% black at 1px width at the desired dimensions for the digital thing.
A physical print would be much larger, so imagine that on your screen you got 72p per inch, on paper that needs to be 600 dpi. You can go lower say 300 dots per inch if it’s very graphic, but a photo quality print is basically like 600p, which is pretty hefty. In a program like inkscape or illustrator etc you can translate a raster image into something that works for stuff like signage, you know, so like making a giant banner image to put on the side of a truck or hang outside a building - same sorta deal here for the scale of the image you’d want to make. Probably the size of a 6 or 8 foot banquet table, possibly larger depending, on what you’re trying to pull off.
If you have the map drawn out at scale, you can scan in sections at A3 or A4 size with a flat scanner and then reassemble the image, to pull it at the highest resolution you can before bringing that image into inkscape to create a vector of it.
ps. here are some youtube tutorial videos on inkscape just to see what sort of stuff I mean. You can probably find more just pulling at those threads. Once you have a map design you can put in tripleA to playtest it by creating a baseline from your svg, exporting the image as a bitmap or png where the borderlines are just solid black ideally at 1px width for those lines, or as close as you can get. For a map image something that’s like 2000-4000p tall and about twice as wide or larger works well for digital sculpts which are png images at 48-54px tall up to 125% currently in tripleA. The map size in tripleA is sorta limited by the unit graphics sizes and the windows in the UI. In inkscape you can make it larger, like for whatever makes sense to have the print look decent. Anyhow, just a quick example you can skip around to see
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Ns028ihACs&list=PL_NagE_y_IhIBNAzw3nFBiF01OKnaltmJ
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DnqtnSTe6qM
https://youtu.be/kS2nrXuR128?t=2611
for tripleA you can use GIMP to make the relief images in png. Here’s an example of similar videos in that program
ps. @barnee Amusingly, I didn’t even realize this was a separate thread until right now lol. I just clicked the little notification to bring me here, thought it was the other UHD thread, so apologies if the above/below sounded sorted confusing. I thought it had just kicked on to a new page. I actually forgot there even was a General forum down at the bottom of the tree lol.
@Panzerstahl-Helm Yeah this is like the main thing that appeals to me about tripleA, the fact that you can go under the hood and tinker. Sorta like painting sculpts or using pennies on the physical boards to do whatever. Some of the original graphics have been adjusted many times to change the tint colors, add drop shadows or things of that sort. The main thing that sorta organized most graphics is that they were 48px squares. Though tripleA can go up to 96x54 px. The extra 8px tall isn’t the most massive ever, but the extra width is pretty significant, since that’s almost double if you use a graphic that is say 2:1 rather or 4:3 aspect rather than 1:1 aspect. For stuff like tanks, aircraft, ships, bases etc this is pretty huge. But when I wanted to try and do an upscale for global the only set of tripleA WW2 units that attempted to go jumbo were Frostion’s, so I asked him if I could use those to create a national tinted set. In his game the presentation was more fully painted with a roundel at the feet and a 3/4 drop shadow on everything.
Mainly I just removed the roundels and shadows and colorized the units for a monotone tint in the same color family, then went back in and painted on some faces or a safety color. Essentially to make it looks more like the standard World War II sculpts (which are totally monotone) but just larger and with some flare to spice it up. I added basically main infantry units and whatever tech stuff was missing, so mostly aircraft to fill in the gaps there. Basically substituting the graphics in the standard folder for the newer stuff at the larger size. Most games don’t really work like that, like where you can just open a subfolder and see hundreds of tiny png image files of like everything used in the display the way you can in tripleA. To browse around see what’s there, replace stuff by using a different file with the same label etc. Typically that stuff would all be just encoded I’d guess. But tripleA is so oldschool that you can just see all the tiny rasters for everything and get a sense of how they come together in-game.
This is great for stuff like customizing and house rules, but then there’s also a dilemma of uniformity or standardizing stuff so that it looks cohesive and doesn’t depart too much from the basis. That’s what I meant about the whole pg13 thing and sorta separating off the main materials from whatever additional stuff. Because one can go in and and explore other aspects in more detail via mods and such, but when it’s all in the standard folder kinda gets confusing potentially.
Current Global package is very much like that, where there are additional graphics to support all the mods and whatnot inside the main map folder. This is why it was challenging initially to know which stuff actually needed to be replaced or which graphics where just like holdovers from other iterations or only used in a mod say. Initially I just copied everything I was using into my UHD global folder to keep it all together somewhere, but now I think it’s probably a bit easier to have inside the UHD only the stuff that is actually used for standard Global, and everything else can live alongside that in some separate customizers/mod folder, or basically separate maps for separate mods to keep the main one lighter footprint. I don’t know that we’re going to do much better than like 80mb, even if removing all the extraneous graphics, so it’d be more just to keep it orderly. Most of the filesize is coming from the reliefTiles themselves, since the single image is quite large.
TripleA can’t use svg really, like for anything other than font, and even that if displayed in the UI is treated as a raster graphic, so the main map image we see in-game, the relief is just a giant ass PNG. It get’s pretty hefty the more pixels that have to be displayed, especially if in color. At first I tried to do this UHD thing at like 16000px the same as the other big map, but I had a lot of difficulty there since the image becomes so large and it’s a challenge to say create an image off it in GIMP with a dozen layers. At 11000px I was able to get maybe 6 layers going at once before GIMP would just devour my ram and start locking up, like any sort of filter or copy/paste action taking many seconds and the whole map to take a few minutes to export. And that for an image not particularly crazy, like these reliefs are sorta basic and bare bones in the grand scheme, but then the unit graphics sorta carry it, just cause they’re all jumbo and have a bit more detail.
Anyhow, to the earlier point, if looking for some familiar faces I’d restrict it just these figures… Not these box cover illustrations but perhaps the photographs they painted from, or just the same figure in a different photograph, or stuff like that. Basically for the stuff that is in print
the 1941 starter board just uses the same box cover art as the Anniversary.
1942 Spring, and 1942 second edition, A&AO all use the same illustration.
I think probably any historical figure depicted on a box cover since AA50 came out would be ok to use for a visual, but probably comes down to how it’s purposed. Like if you go to the source image, not the painted illustrations I mean, but the dudes depicted. So like you see on the boards for Japan like Genda and Yamamoto, I think maybe Hara? Like usually IJN seems to be the theme there. Basically the films Tora Tora Tora or Midway. The theater boards tend to show more like the regular GI Joes, but I think Guadalcanal has like Nimitz and some other dude who’s face I can’t recall right now. The Pacific board 2000 didn’t have figures just painted aircraft and ships. Europe 1999 had sorta the generic soldiers in a photomontage. I think the more recent boards post AH aegis are sorta more in the ballpark.
It’s hard for me to remember who painted what or when, but Jim Butcher, Beasley, Sansaver etc the gang there all kinda set the art direction over the years so that it’s fairly consistent from board to board even decades on. I think the stuff from the 80s and early aughts still looks pretty cool, but for figures I’d stick to the more recent boards for the changing times. Anyhow, massive digression there. Glad you like it though! Have fun out there!
For sure!
Yeah, there’s like some sort of weird uncanny valley aspect too, like when the game becomes a bit too realistic that way visually, sorta loses an element there which I kinda dig. So in Iron Blitz for example, it was just a name and some stars, sorta at the level of Looney Tunes cartoon, but not fully visualized in any way.
I think what might be more interesting is some sort of caricature of a General, or probably even better would be just some Officer Corps thing, or an advisor who could maybe grimace when the dice go bad, but without going much beyond that. Then one could give it the flavor, but without going out in the weeds. I think the little gif style video clips or newspapers clippings, or even the cool end game stats graphs could probably do a similar type of visual flare but I don’t know how to do that stuff really. Like the sound or animation stuff. But yeah sorta cartoons and penny flyers, I just feel like that fits the plastic army men vibe of the thing somewhat better somehow hehe.
You can do whatever makes the most sense, but to me it’s sorta not necessary for a global style game, but then I didn’t really know what all might be useful for an expansion really. I found for myself that, as it starts to look more realistic in the vibe, the uncanny valley starts to open up. Even with the map I see the same, like if you magnify in too close on a topo it sorta starts coming apart at the seams a bit in that way, but then the cartoon aspect kinda compensates with map colors or whatever. Kinda trippy how that works
ps. Anyway I’m kinda rambling, the short of it would be something like just trying to keep Global more general audience or pg13 in the vibe. I think there’s probably room for other takes on it as well, but for the regular game probably anything not assigned could get nixed? Then whatever else just lives in some sort of customizer thing where peeps can riff and do variants, in the same ways they do on the home board. At first I was thinking just put a bunch of stuff in so it’s easier to play around with, but then that could get confusing if trying to figure out which stuff the game actually uses, like for tech say or default options of that sort, as opposed to just like random HR idea I had once hehe. Basically so that when they open the Global folder or the UHD analogy the player would sorta see the same stuff in the same place, like even if the graphics are different, same folders and such, just so they’d know what’s what like that when browsing. Anyway, just let me know, whatever seems best or easiest for you. I’m playing Dragons again, so just hit me up if ya need anything dude. Catch ya next round!
pps. oh and just one other thought, so for the commander dude graphics, if any, I would probably follow the cues from the Box cover art of the OOBs, but like post AA50. Meaning I probably wouldn’t highlight any figures that aren’t making those more recent covers. The old MB box art blue box from 1984 and even the Revised box from 2002 features figures and flags that I would just avoid in 2024. Like if the they weren’t in Tora Tora Tora or the film Patton as an already semi iconographic figure, but even the poster type art for a box cover or manual art feels different than say a piece that moves on the gameboard. For that it’s almost like you’d rather see something off brand, than big name historical figures, since it’s always kinda dicey. Faces are somehow charming though, and I think there is something to be said for providing something to RP against. You know so like instead of pretending to be anyone specific it’s more like some other name or just Commander 1, 2, 3 etc. I think if it was more like random non commissioned officers who pop up in some news reel at the end of the year, or in a battle screen, you could sorta capture that. Like those old Might & Magic games where dudes look upset and scowl cause the battle is going south lol. Maybe like an operator who patches in the news from the front at round’s end, ticker tape style. For a general or admiral type unit that plays on the field, I’d consider just some extra jumbo Tank or Ships or Sculpt-look inf type, an abstract Chevron maybe? Not sure though, I’m not familiar enough with those house rules.
So those are extra images that were going to be for commanders in the variant 1941 game. You could probably ditch em all from the standard package since they’re extraneous, and cause I also put those in the extra folder with map making stuff. Sorta your call there, what all to include. Like there are some extra tanks and whatnot as well. Mechanically those Commander units were going to work sorta like bombers, except also as a ground/naval unit which boosted the attack/defense of other units.
I used each of the Generals from the Iron Blitz 1999 game, plus a few more for the pick six. I tried to avoid some of the most horrid Nazis and also tried to go with peeps who got their comeuppance and died during the war rather than being hanged afterwards, so nope, not Goring. I had them as Command 1, Command 2 etc, cause I was less interested in the named figures and more just sorta generic visualizations like for a general staff. The general idea was to avoid sus RP, by avoiding the political leadership and focusing on the military, or just choosing peeps on team Axis who would be less fraught or maybe just completely unrecognizable, which seemed somehow preferable. That was a bit of a challenge, so I’m not sure it’s entirely satisfying. Like initially I just wanted to go with a broadcast TV hogan’s heroes type thing, or just to keep all the basterds inglorious or whatever.
For G I had Manstein, Rommel, Valentine Hube, Kesselring, Guderian, Doenitz.
For the Soviets it was Zhukov, Konev, Vatutin, Vasilevsky, Rokossovsky, Katukov
And I just did something like that for each of the big 6. I picked most of them for reasons of having like the right hat for the job, more than any sort of statement about who was the better random general. In Iron Blitz it was 5 star, 4 star, 3 star, but I didn’t try to follow that idea. There’s probably a rogue email or post in that thread somewhere that I had em still labelled, but yeah you could probably use whatever. I basically just cropped what I could find that had a vibe into a circle and colorized them in a couple cases where I could only find BW stuff. There are like a million of these sorts or portraits floating around, particularly in the Hearts of Iron game series, though I tried to riff off stuff that was in the wiki rather than those.
Yeah that’s Ike and Bradley. For my thinking it’s kinda better to push it pretty Hollywood if going that direction. Like I almost just did George C. Scott for Patton and Karl Malden for Bradley, cause my aesthetic is basically technicolor flicks of the 60s and 70s.
Or like for the dime store balsa wood flyer, pretty much this is my jam… I just think it works better generally hehe
That just totally made my day!!!
Have a blast out there!
Ok here is the last step, changing the lines from dark to light.
I removed the interior pattern so it would be a bit closer to Revised look. Then pasted the baseline on top of that layer. Basically just taking the baseline expand by like 2px say with a little blur. If you take that and make it half opacity you’ll still have the tripleA highlight effect working.
Here’s how it looks…
Here’s the stuff for your folder… has the baseTiles, reliefTiles and smallMap for that vibe. This would be a good one just for using the HEX color picker, or to insert and alternative pattern.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1pLRotTI9uUmPGmL1ASv6xAmhTvahFnM8/view?usp=sharing
Let me know if you got that working. I think you could probably riff from there to get something pretty close to the overall feel.
The territory highlight effect should still work for you, like for tile selection or in edit mode, it will still light up. The baseline is basically showing as like a midtone grey inside the white, just so it can have some contrast for that. Lines hold for me to about 18% zoom out. You can go back in there and make adjustments with pattern fills or playing with the borders but just for something to work from.
Here is a version of the same just overlayed on top of the topographical version.
Here are the baseTiles, reliefTiles and smallMap for that vibe…
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1hBnHHfP3ehfg_56RSKCV5JkRYApDql7a/view?usp=sharing
here is the relief as a larger single image.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1d22YGkcOJ_kC4KcsxWZHu6SwXKhdaR9c/view?usp=sharing
You can combine em in different ways to create different aesthetics, or with different pattern fills and such. But this was just trying to keep things sorta simple. I used map blends off, but it should work with blends on as well, though you’d likely need different HEX colors if going that route, since the land paint over will go very light when blended. Hopefully you can get what you’re after just by changing the colors in Map.properties once you have the dark ocean with light borders thing going on.
Ok so what I did here was to take the above and just reduce the Opacity of the relief by a little bit so from 99% down to 81%. Then I used the darker baseline for the baseTiles to get something similar going.
Looked like this…
Had the lines holding down to 18% zoom out and the convoy and sz numbers sorta just visible enough for me at the normal playscale (around 50-70% map zoom probably for most). Not sure if that seems good for you? You could make lighter blue by making the baseTiles lighter, I just tried to go as dark as I could to see what sort of line color might be needed for the sz boundaries that way. You can change the hue to whatever, it was more trying to match the color value (brightness/darkness) for the lines. For the pattern on land easiest way is to just remove that stuff and have tripleA paint a solid color across the tile. This would basically look like the map with map details turned off, except you’d have some border fades just to have the lines holding.
For the HEX colors on land, you can adjust those in the map.properties for something less vibrant. Wasn’t sure what you wanted there.
Here are the baseTiles, reliefTiles and smallMap for the UHD to match the darker ocean colors there. Basically you just swap those into your UHD Global 1940 downloaded maps and should see something that looks like the above, with the mini map and such working. The value change was pretty subtle, but it reduced the line dance and made the sz and convoy graphics pop just a little harder against the dark blue. Let me know if that works for ya. If it seems ballpark we can riff off that till you got what you’re after.
Catch ya next round dude
No worries! I went through all this trying to figure out how it works too. It’s just not a particularly easy thing to get the head around.
That’s a wild image! I can tell what’s going on though, what happened was that you placed the dark blue reliefTiles I made you for the regular World War II Global map, but must have placed em in the UHD World War II Global maps folder.
Those are different maps with different baselines (different dimensions for the map and different polgyon shapes in the UHD compared to the regular one by Bung). The reliefTiles folder is purely cosmetic and paints on top of the baseTiles. In this case you’re seeing the what it looks like when they’re mismatched hehe.
To use the UHD Global with a similar visual vibe, I’d need to make you some reliefTiles for that one. Here let me do that real quickly just so you can check it out.
Ok here, do the same thing you did before, except this time use these reliefTiles for the UHD. I have them already broken into the tiles, so you’d just need to swap the reliefTiles folder there in the UHD map.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1YEpjVNHicIl3k-NGiSSkOvaWVpzY2RRP/view?usp=sharing
Should give you something that looks like this…
Then you can adjust the National HEX colors to match the darker vibe for the land territory paintjob.
Here is the same relief a reconstructed large image, in case you want to modify it. I might have gone a bit dark for your taste.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1hphEfxTPstUBgdKYqXLXk88yJPRONhhK/view?usp=sharing
All the colors key off each other, since our perception of color is always relative to the other colors nearby, so the HEX colors for the land paintjob may appear quite different depending on which blue you use for the ocean. Tricky part is usually just finding a color for the border blue that will hold to max zoom out, without too much dancing or the lines disappearing when it scales out to the max.
Going very dark you’ll lose a fair bit of contrast in the mids. What I would do probably is switch the label graphics for the sz zone numbers or convoy graphics to be brighter maybe. Or alternatively you could just play around with the blues till you got one you like.
To carry the color over into the minimap, the image file to adjust is the one called smallMap. It’s basically just a color swatch with a little ice at the top for the unassigned arctic tiles.
You can fine tune it if you want, I usually do this by bringing the baseline and the relief into GIMP, then using the baseline to make selections on the relief by using the color select tool and then switching between layers once the selection is made. Then you can control only the stuff that’s happening in the sea zone tiles, while ignoring the stuff on land. Another thing I might try is to expand just the fade around the continent contours, so it will match the thickness of the sea zone boundaries. So you’ll notice the lighter blue line appears thicker in the ocean, because it’s painting light blue on both sides of a black 1px zone boundaries, whereas the transition from land to sea only paints that blue on one side of the line. Has the effect of making the contour lines for the continents appear thinner when zoomed out. Anyway I can show you how to do that or change the border effect once you know what sort of blue you want, then switch those labels to key off it slightly lighter rather than darker for the sz numbers and such.
ps. the unit graphics for the UHD and regular global are interchangeable, so you can swap them out for either game and should work. The place on the 54px scale units will be a little different if used on the smaller map, they’ll crowd, but you can use the regular 48px unit in the UHD map, upscaled at 125% in the unit view in tripleA 2.6 they will appear somewhat smaller but still works. I haven’t made the rail pattern for it yet, just has the topo, but one could do a different fill if trying to get a different sort of look going. The revised board had a pretty simple pattern for the land TTs, like just a couple graphic design elements, the color fields there were sorta just a uniform color painting over the ground tiles. To achieve something similar you could just collapse the topo completely and have the colors instead pass through like a 50% mat gray at half opacity or something. Then use whatever units you prefer for it.
If you can get a UHD relief to work for you, I can show you a simpler way to control the blues. Basically it’d work by changing the blue in the baseTiles color so the baseTiles undercolor will show through. Right now it’s quite bright in the basetiles for the default, so I just covered them over completely with the example relief, but basically you could control how light of a blue you want the color pop to be around the sz borders in a few different ways by changing the baseline color which is a single color edit, but you have to use a program like Photoshop GIMP or Paint etc. It’s more just finding the right blue for what you’re after and then kinda keying off those colors to get a more subtle line going in the Relief. Basically just so the 1px baseline doesn’t disappear against a dark background. Once you get something up and running it’s easier to tool around and see how the edits will visualize when you change the colors around.
I could just make the ocean stuff in the relief more transparent. Currently it’s at full opacity now for the ocean area. Once you know how to run the image tile breaker map creator tool for the reliefTiles and baseTiles it’s easier to switch stuff around I can just send you a base with darker blue and a relief to match that blue and should be simpler to edit.
Not sure on that one, I haven’t used the tripleA mapskins feature in some time. Like I’m pretty sure the last time I had one of those skins working was about 5 years ago or more. It’s possible there’s some conflict there with the files you’re trying to update, if it’s not the vanilla download of World War II Global but one that has already been modified via a skin. I’ve been using the 2.6 pre-release rather than the 2.5 stable for what seems like a small eternity now hehe.
When I go to grab the mapskin that I think you might be referring to in tripleA 2.6 it won’t display in-game from the launch dropdown cause it doesn’t have the YAML file I think. Still shows up in my downloaded maps folder, but I can’t get at in 2.6.
I’m not a developer for tripleA, just a some sort of map customizer superuser I suppose, so someone else might be able to help you troubleshoot for older versions. In 2.6 some stuff was changed with how maps are parsed. Like the newer map downloads folder needs that YAML file and some other stuff to properly extract and unzip the material, which 2.6 does automatically now upon downloading a map with “download maps” launch button.
I would suggest modifying the stuff in your downloaded maps World War II Global folder directly, rather than via a skin, as that must be where the hangup is?
If I remember correctly, 2.5 would run the downloaded.maps as zipped up and you’d have to manually extract the folders to make changes, but I think 2.6 should automatically extract the mapfolders once downloaded now, so that you can modify what’s inside the map folders without going through that step. I’m guessing you got TripleA 2.5 up? It’s possible that there are some differences there, like where that mapskin just hasn’t been updated perhaps.
I recall hearing something along those lines a while back, about issues with mapskin compatibility. Or perhaps you have more than one map of the same name or something like that. Initially I think the mapskins feature was meant to make it more convenient to mod tripleA games with a 1 click swap, but there where only ever a few mapskins created that way. They must have gone a different direction with it, support for that feature might not have made the cut? So far as I know the only Mapskin for Global was that one that made it look like A Battle Map for the display, back in like 2014 I think? If that is the skin you are using, I see it has several adjustments made to the map.props and possibly the polys/tiles themselves, which would make it not cross compatible. I’m not sure how to mod material within the skins anymore.
Anyway, I would just go with the vanilla Global game or the UHD upscale for Global if you want to tinker around. 2.6 also has many features which 2.5 doesn’t have such as map scaling to 200% and the like. I can show you how to create a relief with those colors, or a similar visual in the relief, but it would be modding those files manually rather than whatever is in the skin. For example, the color coding for that A Battle Map skin in the map.properties reads…
color.Neutral=B7997C
color.Neutral_True=B7997C
color.Neutral_Axis=B7997C
color.Neutral_Allies=B7997C
color.Italians=93936E
color.British=8E7B1C
color.UK_Europe=8E7B1C
color.UK_Pacific=8E7B1C
color.French=1E6BAA
color.Impassable=B7997C
color.Americans=506400
color.Russians=A83F25
color.Germans=536342
color.Japanese=CC5F00
color.Chinese=B5A715
color.ANZAC=8E641B
color.Dutch=5C4FAD
color.Mongolians=B7997C
In the vanilla map it reads like this… So you can just substitute the above in your own map.properties to ballpark it…
color.Neutral=d8ba7c
color.Neutral_True=b88a6c
color.Neutral_Axis=6A5B3D
color.Neutral_Allies=d8ba7c
color.Italians=58360E
color.British=8E6600
color.UK_Europe=8E6600
color.UK_Pacific=8E6600
color.French=10569C
color.Impassable=e7d5b0
color.Americans=026400
color.Russians=940000
color.Germans=3f3f3f
color.Japanese=e19521
color.Chinese=533c69
color.Canada=bf0010
color.ANZAC=4d7f7f
color.Dutch=ff6d00
color.Mongolians=d8ba7c
That mapskin looks like it also uses a pretty different opacity for the reliefTiles, which will change the actual display of the colors being passed through it, so the colors listed above will look different on Bung’s map than they would on that Skin (different reliefTiles).
Anyway, I would just ditch the global mapskin from your downloaded maps folder and redownload the reg Global folder (stow the skin files somewhere else for safekeeping, you can always refer to it if trying to recreate a similar look for your modded version). When you run the regular map sans skin, you should be able to modify the stuff in the normal way by just replacing files or folders manually, for just the things you want changed. Instead of the whole package at once, which was the mapskin approach. They were maybe unbundled at some point it looks like. Probably cause skins end up being quite large, like heavy in the filesize. Depends what all you’re trying to do. Like if it’s just changing the ocean color in the relief that’s pretty light footprint, but if it also changes the txt files baseTiles and reliefTiles and unit graphics etc it gets more involved. I think it’s probably easier to tell what’s going on the step by step way, so you can see how each individual change is tweaking it, rather than the big overhaul at a go.
Hope that helps!
ps. Oh also, for anything that’s in your mapskin and already working, you should be able recreate all that stuff directly in the regular folder. The difference will just be in how it’s applied. So rather than a dropdown ‘switch to a different look’ type feature within a single map (which was I guess the original idea of a convenient map skin, to switch on the fly), basically that’s just how global will look for you by default when you launch it locally. Some files are more essential than others, the Polygons.txt is a big one, since that defines how TripleA is actually drawing the baseline in-game. Changes in that file would need to match what’s going more generally, otherwise it’s basically a different map and you might have issues say joining a game with another opponent using the regular map, unless they have the same file tweaks and such applied. Mapskins I think would get around this by translating the information in those more core files, but essentially all we want to do is get whatever standard to run with an updated cosmetic relief. You can change most things to whatever like substituting unit or label graphics or the colors of the land TTs painted over, but the Polys and the basic structure of the folders within the game folder those need to be on the same page, or it won’t load. It’s probably something simple like is mapskin in the props that tells tripleA what to do for skins, but I can’t recall. Since the mapskin seems to be the issue here, I’d start with seeing if you can get the regular version up to just replace what’s in the reliefTiles folder. If that works then you know you’re playing with a version of the map you can modify and make changes to. Then you can compare the material in that regular folder with what’s inside the other mapskin folder, and see which things you want to include for adjustments. Probably the easiest way to go I think
@DessertFox599 to run the map creator tool > run image Tile breaker you shouldn’t need the polys for that.
What might be the issue is that you need to navigate to the downloaded map folder to point the Tool to the right spot, when prompted for the folder called “reliefTiles” in whatever map you’re using. The default will point you to main tripleA directory (where maps used to live in the old days) but the maps are now stored locally in the downloaded maps folder.
For me its in Users > name > tripleA > downloaded maps > world war II global > map > reliefTiles
Basically they’re kept in the same place where you’d browse to find your local savegames, but clicking into downloaded maps instead of savegames.
If you are trying to reconstruct the single relief from the tiles already broken up in the folder (the reverse process) you will be asked if you want to draw the Polygons into the image for the last prompt. I usually click No/cancel to that, since it will paint the polys on top instead of showing through from the baseline under image, but shouldn’t really matter for this one cause the border effects are pretty simple.
If you have the reliefTiles ready to go somewhere, you can just replace the folder directly instead of using the Map Tools (this is how maps skins would work, but this is like the manual process). Here they are already broken into tiles, so you can just extract the zip and replace that folder which should be simpler. Once you know where to navigate the browser it’s pretty quick to run the Tile Breaker again if you want to modify the single image and then break the tiles again to see the changes, like if you want to go darker blue or lighter blue or whatever.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1UsQs5V_TAIMpyPWYBGHFxrWwojjQZmu9/view?usp=sharing
Let me know if that did the trick for ya
If you’re using the world war II global, navigate to your downloaded maps folder and locate the file called map.properties
When you open this file with a text editor like notepad, you’ll see each player-nation listed with a six digit color code (HEX) and also the map dimensions. For that it should say
map.width=7705
map.height=3213
From the tripleA main menu go to
Map Creator Tools > Other Optional Things > Run Image Tile Reconstructor and enter the width/height to get the relief as a single image. Usually the relief is a larger more detailed image. The image is already present in the reliefTiles folder but it’s broken up into 256px squares. This just reassembles that into a single image the same way tripleA does for the in-game display.
Here is the full size default relief image already reconstructed…
I downscaled to display here, but looks like this in the default presentation.
You can see that in this particular map the ocean is painted directly onto the relief at 100% opacity with the cloud effect thing going on. We can either ditch it by eliminating just that portion of the relief, or we can modify or replace it. Easiest way to do either is to open the baseline map and use it make the selection. Basically we can bring both images into GIMP or Photoshop etc as separate layers and use the one to make selection for the other, by switching back and forth.
The baseline image is much smaller, so sometimes that one will be present in the folder. In the standard global it’s labelled baseTiles.png. It looks like this… again downscaled to display here.
So basically we’d use a selection tool (color select) click the solid blue on the baseline, then when we switch over to the relief layer that same area will remain selected. You can just darken that portion if you want. Here’s an example, keeping the same clouds and whatnot just pushing the values darker.
If you run that image through the Map Creator Tools > Step 2 Run The Image Tilebreaker, you can replace the stuff in the reliefTiles folder with the new darker blue.
For the National Colors, go back to the map.properties file and edit the HEX colors there to find colors that match the Revised vibe.
You can find the 6 digit HEX codes in whatever image editing program you’re using, or can you use a web palette like this to find the right HEX colors for each player.
Easiest way is just to pick a color, copy the HEX code to the map.props for that nation and save the file. Then fire up tripleA to see how it’s painting over.
The in-game display for those colors will get passed through the relief transparency which that dude made, so they may show slightly differently in-game than the HEX color swatches you’ll see on the website.
With Bung’s relief the colors will become more muted/gray once they path through the pattern he used. But just need to the make the Brits more khaki or the Germans more blue-gray or things of that sort. When you just switch those HEX codes, it will change the painted colors.
I would suggest also widening the sz border lines and using a lighter colored line for that, or maybe using the dotted line effect to capture the vibe. The default black lines won’t display very well otherwise just cause the ocean is now darker. You can use the baseline image to recreate border fx on the relief layer. Say instead of a 1px black line, you can use a more rounded and beefier light blue line or whatever makes sense.
You can apply a little blur or antialiasing to soften the borders after they’re widened or do a dash instead, things like that. You can paint the border stuff directly into the relief, or remove a section of the relief to allow the ocean color from the baseline to show through at full opacity. Since the blue from the baseline was already much lighter than the darkened relief I just removed a couple pixels around the border edge to let that lighter color bleed in, just so you could still see the sz boundaries, esp when scaled out.
Here’s some more random stuff that might be useful. It’s kinda long winded, cause I always have that issue, but basically a few screens down shows how to do the border grow thing with GIMP. https://forums.triplea-game.org/topic/3423/a-brief-guide-for-making-a-map-relief
What I did for this one, was to create a little gap where the sea zone color from the baseline would show through. I think that should help to see the Sea Zone boundaries. It also will give a little color pop at the border edges. Let me know if that’s the sort of thing you were looking for.
Here is the full size relief with those adjustments made…
You can see below how it displays with the default HEX colors and the sea zone bordering. I would probably adjust the convoy graphic for brightness, because it displays quite dark, but otherwise should work I think.
Hopefully that helps!
ps. another similar approach, is to use the view tab “Blends.” This will blend the relief and the baseline image together, so by creating a baseline with a very dark blue you can bring that darker color into the final display. On land it will mix with 50% white (showing like the land color from the base) and all the HEX colors will become very light, like pastels. Here you can see the effect, the blue from the base now bleeds into the relief halfway. The color from the boundaries around the sz will present slight thinner, cause the contrast isn’t as high. But basically you can do it with a single color edit to the baseline image, run that through the breaker and use blends to get the darkness. HEX colors you can also go darker to compensate for the white that’s blending in. Default HEX and the stuff above gives something like this when blended.
You can see with the blend the blue is more vibrant and the national HEX colors are very light, so you’d probably want to adjust those to bring them a little closer to the unit tints if going blended, or maybe adjust the units themselves if they pop too hard. Depending how bright your screen is you might find a slightly darker/lighter shade of blue easier on the eyes. The unblended lines held to max zoom out for me, the blended ones had a little dance to em. You can change the highlight to be brighter if you wanted, but just to show how it could work.
Azimuth had a great idea to get the zoom to work, try this…
I doubled the width of your base from 3200px to 6400px expanding the canvas only to the right. This allows the image to zoom quite a bit further in both directions in/out.
This is the display in-game…
At max zoom out you can see the entire diamond
At max zoom in (200%) you can get pretty close. Like right on top of it, so some hot fuzz there, but not too shabby.
When you run the base and relief through the tile breaker, just remember to also do the new width in the map.properties and to the minimap. For the minimap you can paint that image blue or do a little rescale. Just depends how wide you want the stats bar really.
On the map view itself, you could place any graphic in the empty section, which only becomes visible at max zoom out anyway, but could be used for stuff like units charts or whatever to fill the space.
Here’s the baseline and relief I used in case you want to experiment around
preview of widened base
Relief wide (simple borders)
https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/mu9yslcuzyut3bc9c54bs/relief_simple_world_war_1_1914_widezoom.png?rlkey=9ocsrt9ht9rpct48gxtrds6ku&dl=0
Hope that helps
ps. fooling around with it again, I think if you just go 4:3 or 16:9 aspect when you extend the canvas of the baseline map image (just to the right or you’d have to redo the place and centers and such) you should be fine. Those images above are both at 2:1, but checking that out will also show you the dimensions of the little marquee on the mini. So you can adjust the aspect of the overall map that way, even if the main area of interest is off to the lefthand side. Just to get the zoom to work right. Pretty much everything else you can handle with the relief for whatever visual. When I think of WW1 I tend to picture a more period propaganda vibe or whatever with all the gilded embellishments, but 1914 in the design is sorta more like a fauvist riff on that I think, pretty modernist in it’s take, like to be all tilted on the side hehe. Even the color choice struck me that way, sorta different than I expected, but also made sense once I acquiesced to that. Like the world on it’s sidewise, seems apt. Anyhow, best I could figure for making a zoom work there. Seemed to do the trick
I saw this one and threw together a very simple relief for it, just in case you wanted something to riff on. It has no underlayer, just the borderlines.
Basically what I do is take the baseline image, select the black border and copy/paste onto a new transparency layer. Then I expand that selection by 1 px, fill with black. Expand the selection again by another 1 px and apply gaussian blur to the selection area. This creates a gradient or a fade for the border area (basically to soften it, so things look a bit better especially at 200% in triplea 2.6.) Once the fade is in place, I go back in an select/delete the original 1px blaxk from baseline so that part is empty in that relief layer. This allows the baseline to show through the relief, and to change from black to white when a tile is selected in-game to show the highlight effect. Looks like so…
You can then create a pattern or topographical underlayer for the relief by choosing whatever pattern fill and then making that portion/layer of the image semi-transparent in the final relief. Like for whatever visual effects, drawn on graphics, labels and the like.
Main challenge with the 1914 board is it’s diamond presentation. This is tricky when the map is scaling height to width, since it prioritizes the one dimension (I guess cause most maps are typically wider than they are tall, with 1914 being the exception to the general rule). What happens is that rather than zooming out all the way it will crop at about 45% zoom-out, basically cause the image is a square. Basically means you can’t see the full diamond when zoomed out, but just the spot shown here in the mini-map window.
To get the outer diamond to display as something other than white I just filled those areas with a lighter shade of blue. To get that to carry over onto the mini-map the way to do it would be to assign the polygons as sea zone tiles, but just to leave them unconnected (no connections assigned in the xml for those tiles). Then it’ll draw over into the mini map too.
Only way I can think of to pull off a full zoom out would be to warp the board (stretch width), or tilt it on it’s side and stretch, or something along those lines. But that requires adjustments to the baseline and the polys, and you’d lose that sort of diamond vibe coming over from OOB.
Anyhow, here’s the quickie relief…
I tried to keep it pretty simple just in case you wanted to play around. Just needs to go in a folder called “reliefTiles” when run through the map creator tool “run tilebreaker.” It’s only about 800k cause the image is mostly a transparency, but still a little too large to attach a preview here on the boards, just cause it’s 3200x3200px. I put it on dropbox in case you want to grab.
Here’s the base I used to select out the diamond sections and make em a shade of blue.
Anyhow, I was doing it for a couple maps, figured one for 1914 might be cool.
Nice work dude! Catch ya next round
Elk